Current and coming

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Due to the devastating effects of earthquakes, San Francisco has some of the strictest building codes of any American city. As a further precaution, buildings undergo periodic seismic evaluation studies. In 1987 the California Palace of the Legion of Honor underwent such a study, and as a result it was closed to the public in 1992 for seismic retrofitting, restoration, and expansion. This included extensive work on the interior and exterior, the installation of the most advanced environmental and security systems, and the construction of two levels under the existing building. The results may be seen when the museum reopens to the public on November 11.

The Palace of the Legion of Honor, along with the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, is governed by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The Palace was the brainchild of the philanthropist Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (1881-1968), who greatly admired the French Pavilion at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915. This was a replica of the Hotel de Salm in Paris, designed by Pierre Rousseau and completed in 1788. (Under Napoleon that building was renamed the Palais de la Legion d'Honneur.) When the 1915 exposition closed, Spreckels obtained permission from the French government to copy its pavilion for an art museum. The American architect George Applegarth oversaw the plan of the museum, which was a three-quarter scale adaptation of the French original. After delays because of World War I, the museum was finally opened in 1924.

The challenge of completely modernizing the museum while maintaining the historic integrity of the structure fell to the architects Edward Larrabee Barnes and Mark Cavagnero Associates. To stabilize the building against potential earthquake damage, it was essentially tied together with a steel truss and braced with steel beams.

While engineers were evaluating the fabric of the building the administration was re-evaluating the way in which the two institutions that comprise the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are defined. It was determined that the de Young Museum should be dedicated to the art of the Americas and that the Legion of Honor should become the repository for European and ancient art. The latter's collection now numbers some eighty-seven thousand paintings, sculptures, decorative arts objects, and works on paper spanning about four thousand years.

The lower-level expansion has freed the original building for the display of the permanent collection in nineteen galleries. Decorative arts are interspersed with the paintings in the appropriate galleries, and in one room the museum has installed a fifteenth-century wooden ceiling made in Toledo, Spain, that has never before been on view. There are also three European period rooms.

The new garden level is occupied by six galleries for temporary exhibitions that are centered around a sculpture court with a pyramidal skylight (illustrated at left). Also on this level are a paper conservation laboratory, curatorial and administrative offices, a theater, restaurant, the museum store, the Bowles porcelain gallery and study center, and the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts collection and study center, which includes some seventy thousand works on paper donated to the museum in 1948. Museum facilities occupy the lower of the two new levels.

Whistler's match - Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac

One of James Mcneill Whistler's most alluring portraits, Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, is the subject of an exhibition at the Frick Collection in New York City. Entitled The Butterfly and the Bat: Whistler and Montesquiou, the exhibition examines the painting in the contexts of the artist and sitter's relationship and the period in which it was painted. The show opens on November 14 and remains on view through January 28, 1996. It includes more than 125 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, decorative arts objects, books, period costumes, and memorabilia.

With Montesquiou, as with other patrons, Whistler established a close friendship, but in the end quarreled irreparably. In eccentricity and complexity of character, Whistler and Montesquiou were clearly equals. The latter was a French aristocrat who could trace his lineage back to Merovingian times. He was a poet, as well as an astute commentator about, and champion of, some of the most radical artists in France at the end of the nineteenth century, among them Gustave Moreau and Emile Galle. He made no pretense about his homosexuality, and like Whistler he fancied himself a dandy and sought and attained celebrity status.

While Whistler adopted the butterfly as his emblem, Montesquiou took both the bat and blue hydrangea as his, stating that the animal and flower represented "the double sign of the joining of Dissimilarity and of Melancholy." Representations of these symbols decorated the furnishings of Montesquiou's eclectic apartment, which was also crammed with the Orientalia then so much in vogue.